NIH Designates Salk One of Seven National Basic Research Centers Focused on Vision

Professor Tom Albright

A $3.8 million grant from the National Eye
Institute (NEI) of the National Institutes of Health
places the Salk Institute among one of seven
NEI-designated centers focused exclusively on the
basic research of vision, and is the first basic science
facility created by the NEI in nearly a decade.

The only one of its kind in the San Diego region,
the new Salk Institute Center for the Neurobiology
of Vision is a consortium of 15 investigators led by
Thomas Albright conducting research on the visual
system. The five-year grant funds core facilities that
support each of the scientists' research projects.

The new vision center will take a broad approach to
understanding the development and plasticity of the
visual system, the mechanisms of the neural processing
of visual stimuli, and the link between visual
perception and behavior.

Understanding the mechanisms that process visual
inputs in the retina and the brain and how that affects
behavior provides a model system for better understanding
the central nervous system. Such basic
studies can also one day contribute to the development
of prosthetics that restores vision to the blind.